Mexico registered zero economic growth in the second quarter, according to revised data released Friday, meaning that Latin America’s second-biggest economy dodged a recession even more narrowly than previously thought.
“Gross domestic product (GDP)… registered no change in real terms in the second quarter of 2019,” Mexico’s official statistics institute, INEGI, said in a statement.
INEGI had initially said in July that GDP expanded by 0.1 percent in the period from April to June.
That puny-but-positive figure at least indicated the economy had returned to growth, after shrinking in the first quarter of the year.
Friday’s revised figure, on the other hand, is a fresh bit of bad news for Mexico and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an anti-establishment leftist who took office in December promising to kick-start the economy, among other things.
He has not gotten off to an encouraging start: the economy shrank by 0.2 percent in the first quarter, raising the specter of a recession — two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction — just months into Lopez Obrador’s term.
Mexico’s officially stagnant economy — second only to Brazil’s in size in Latin America — is just the latest bleak economic news worldwide.
www.france24.com/en/20190823-mexican-economy-registers-zero-growth-in-q2